Requires no hardware upgrade and works with any NICs that support VMQ.

Example usage: network intensive guest apps that need to scale out from just a single vCPU processing interrupts.

DVMQ on the host NICs (for the virtual switch) allows us to use vRSS.

NIC Teaming

There is a new Dynamic Mode in WS2012 R2. This balances based on flowlets. Optimized utilisation of a team on existing hardware.

You can spread your traffic inbound and outbound. In WS2012, can only balance on outbound. EG, 1 VM would be pinned to one pNIC. Now “flowlets” give the OS much finer grained load balancing, across all the NICs, regardless of what workload you are running.

Extended ACLs

In WS2012 you can block/allow/measure based on source and destination address (IP or MAC).

In WS2012 R2, you can allow or block for specific worklaods:

Network address

Application port

Protocol type

There is now stateful packet inspection, understanding a transaction.

Remote Live Monitoring

Remote monitoring of WS2012 traffic can be done, but it is difficult. In WS2012 R2, you can mirror and capture traffic for remote and local viewing. GUI experience with Message Analyzer (the new NetMon). Supports remote offline traffic captures. Filtering based on IP addresses and VMs.

Dynamic Mode LBFO will be first. We see traditional WS2012 NIC teaming. Dynamic is enabled, and we see all NICs being roughly balanced in PerfMon.

Enabling it in the demo sees throughput go up for the VM – yes, CPU utilisation goes up in the VM, but that’s why the VM was given more vCPUs to allow more networking resources – otherwise the traffic is limited by being pinned to a single vCPU.

Test-NetConnection

The goal was to make Ping better. It’s a new PowerShell cmdlet. It pings, but it returns back a lot of information: Soutce IP, remote IP latency, test a port, get more detailed info, route information, etc.

IMO, it’s about damned time This is a very nice tool, and a nice hook to get people into looking at some basic PowerShell scripting, to extend what the cmdlet can already do by itself.

HNV uses a 24-bit identifier meaning the thing is extremely scalable, when compared to the very limited 4096 possible VLANs.

Dynamic Learning of Customer Addresses

HNV can dynamically learn Consumer Addresses being used in the VM Network. Allows for guest DHCP and guest clusters to be used in HNV VM Networks.

Performance

NIC teaming is supported on the host. NVGRE Task Offload Enable NICs will be able to offload the processing associated with NVGRE. Emulex and Mellanox are early suppliers.

Enhanced diagnostics

A host admin/operator can use a PoSH cmdlet to test connectivity to a VM, and validate that the VMs can communicate without having access to the VM (network-wise).

Hyper-V Extensible Switch

One layer is the forwarding switch. The Cisco Nexus 100V is out. NEC has an OpenFlow extension. In WS2012 R2, the HNV filter is moved into the virtual switch. 3rd party extensions can now work on the Consumer Address and the Provider Address (both VM and physical addresses).

A effect of this is that 3rd parties can bring their own network virtualization and implement it in Hyper-V. Examples: Cisco CXLan or Open Flow network virtualization.

Standards Based Switch Management

Using PowerShell, you can manage physical switches. Done via Open Management Infrastructure (OMI). VMM provides automation for this. Common management infrastructure across vendors. Automate common network tasks. Logo program to make switches “just work”.

Built-In Software Gateways

A WS2012 R2 gateway has 3 features:

Site to site multi-tenant aware VPN gateway

Multi-tenant aware NAT for Internet access

Forwarding gateway for in-datacentre physical machine access

Demo with Gabe

Site-Site g/w.

2 clients in HNV. Both using different VPN protocols, SSTP and IKEv2. No access without VPN tunnels. Connects the VPNs of Red. Now Red can connect to Red VMs and Blue cannot to anything. Connects Blue’s VPN and Blue can now connect to Blue VMs.

IP Address Management (IPAM)

Added in WS2012, primarily for auditing IP usage and planning.

In WS2012 R2, you can manage IPs in the physical and virtual spaces. It integrates with SCVMM 2012 R2, and allows you to deploy IP pools, etc.

Improvements Summary

In my words, WS2012 innovated, and WS2012 R2 has smoothed the corners, making the huge strides in 2012 more achievable and easier to manage. And a bunch of new features too.

2 Comments on What’s New In Windows Server 2012 R2 Networking

I hope there is an easy upgrade path for people on 2012 right now. The migration I went through from 2008 R2 to 2012 was not simple and very time consuming. (building new clusters and migrating everything by rolling 1 node over at a time).

Can you run a cluster with 2012 and 2012 R2? It would great if you can so you can put hosts in maintenance mode and upgrade them.

This is one area that VMware is 1000x easier. Running mixed mode VMware clusters was supported and upgrading to new versions very simple.

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About this Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I've worked with technologies from the desktop to the server, Active Directory, System Center, security and virtualisation.

Secondly, I use my blog as a notebook. There's so much to learn and remember in our jobs that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has saved my proverbial many times in the past.

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Anything you do to your IT infrastructure, applications, services, computer or anything else is 100% down to your own responsibility and liability. Aidan Finn bears no responsibility or liability for anything you do. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before doing whatever you decide to do.